If not guided by an ominous score and a remarkable lead performance of brittle, jittery anxiety, it might take you a third of Alice, Darling, a new film starring Anna Kendrick as a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, to realize something is wrong. Alice’s relationship with Simon (Charlie Carrick), a thirtysomething Toronto-based artist with a suave British accent, could seem innocuous on a clue-by-clue basis. In isolation, a “thinking of me?” text with a kissing face emoji, or the way he drapes his arm over her like a cape, or his chiding to raise her professional ambitions, could seem like affection. The tell is in Alice’s frayed hair – barrel-curled into, as her friend Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) puts it, an outdated Gossip Girl coif and, from the very first scene, nervously pulled into matted clumps.
Alice, Darling, directed by Mary Nighy from a script by Alanna Francis, is the rare film to depict the battering of the psyche, let alone one which deftly and accurately depicts the corrosive, insidious effect of coercive control absent the evidence of physical abuse. Simon never hits her, a point which Alice uses to discount the seriousness of her situation to her two best friends. “But he doesn’t hurt me though,” she insists to Tess and Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku), who too slowly realize the extent to which Simon’s yawning insecurities and possessiveness have erased Alice’s sense of self and autonomy. The film smartly prioritizes effect over cause, resisting the trap of litigating just how toxic Simon’s behavior was nor the escape hatch of “it wasn’t that bad.” We see snippets of his manipulations but mostly how it manifests in Alice: the way she obsessively buffs her body into near hairlessness, recites ominous facts about sugar, rehearses a lie about seeing her friends to escape his judgement, treats sex as responsibility rather than pleasure. The way she expunges a flirty waiter’s number from a napkin like she’s bleaching blood, lest Simon find it in the trash can.
